Category: Real Talk

I was behind on comics from last week, I’ve been busy, and work has generally kept me away from the internet so when I finally got around to examining the #FireRickRemender story I got frustrated.

Rick Remender’s Captain America run introduced Jet Black, a Big Barda pastiche who is the daughter of Armin Zola. She was raised to be evil in Zola’s Dimension Z, she fought Cap there and eventually she got to our world and started working with Captain America and Co. Honestly, I missed the third volume of stories since Remender’s Cap isn’t my favorite run and I’d rather read stuff I want to but this controversy got big so I sat down and read the issue.

In Jason Aaron’s first arc of Thor: God of Thunder, he introduces a character known as Gorr the God Butcher, an alien who saw his fellow people die when the gods they believed to failed to save his world from drought, famine and injury. The faithful were seen as brutal but weak minded people, driven by conviction in the face of proof via absence that god did not exist. Driven out Gorr eventually finds two of his gods, leads to the death of both and then using the weaponry of one, begins a campaign of slaughter across the universe killing gods, culminating in him rewriting the timeline so that he might kill all gods of the universe using the God bomb. With that power to shape the world, to fell deities, he becomes recognized as a god himself, but does that make him a god?

I’ve been to a few comic museums – Toonseum in Pittsburgh, the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco and recently the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum at OSU and so far I haven’t seen that perfect cartoon museum, or at least the one big feature I want to see. I mean all of the facilities I mentioned are very nice – but none of them are made for the comic medium itself and that is the biggest issue.

Comics are sequential art. Comics usually tell a story. Comics usually are not a static moment like paintings are, like photographs are, like statues are. Comics are a serial art form and while a single page can show a lot, it doesn’t capture what a comic is – a way to tell stories. If you only give part of a story, devoid of context, you loose a lot. It becomes all about the art and writing for that page, not how everything ties in, and it removed the comic as a tool to tell stories. When you start posting single pages of original sets of art on the wall for a comic museum, devoid of context, unless that page is an entire story, you’ve messed with the art form. You don’t cut a hand off of a full body statue and put it in a museum as a solitary piece of art. If you post a single movie still, that is not the same as showing the actual movie – and sure it may be helpful to illustrate a directorial style but you miss the context and the actual format of the art itself. A well shot still from a movie is not a movie itself. A single page from a multi page story is not itself.

from War Machine #9 by Greg Pak, Allan Jefferson, Nelson Pereira and Jay David Ramos

The Dulles Brothers lead the fight against communism. They lead the presidents to the targets at Allen Dulles was the Director of the CIA and his brother John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State. Two men had the power, connections and belief that shaped the world during the Cold War leading us into Vietnam and the Middle East and without them, the entire world would be vastly different.

Norman Osborn had the power, he had the connections and the beliefs but what ultimately lead to his downfall through the events of Dark Reign and Siege are what made him a fascinating figure.

Osborn became the director of HAMMER after using his Thunderbolts (and information he stole from Deadpool) to stop the Skrull Invasion. He was able to completely oust the former administration, he was able to turn those would would oppose him into pariahs and outlaws and with his public support he could have ruled indefinitely except for one thing – his partners – The Cabal and The Dark Avengers.

The Gutters is a comic written by comics fan and creator Ryan Sohmer that attempts to address current comic news and events. There is nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but ultimately Sohmer often seems confused with what the issue actual is failing both discerning readers and… well everyone who unfortunately chooses to read The Gutters.

DC has been having continuous problems keeping on writers and it was the Batwoman team dropping off today that made me go “man, screw DC policies I have no desire to write for the nu52 at all.” The Batwoman team should not be forced to complain about editorial mandates unless they went off the deep end. So I’m sharing my Superboy pitch that will now more than never, never be used.

A few weeks back my editor gave me the opportunity to pitch to DC. The previous writer had quit the series and because my editor has connections and no desire to write for them, I got the opportunity and was excited. I could make something fun and solid that even if it didn’t get picked up, might get me considered for writing something there. And what was the title? Superboy.

I decided to keep a stiff upper lip – I liked Superboy in Young Justice. I liked the angsty loner vibe dealing with powers and seclusion. Of course, I made some mistakes there because the current DC status and the realistic mix of emotions in Young Justice was very different. I was forgetting that this tied into the nu52 with it’s new confusing continuity and then trying to read the actual issues to get a background failed. They were pretty poorly written and well drawn but unattractive pages and I felt my eyes glazing over on the pages. Eventually I just went to a comics wikia and talked to friends who suffered through the series to understand what was happening so I can add in a throw away line relating to the current storyline/status. And then I made my next mistake – making what would have been an old DC story, instead a nu52 one.(more…)

Criticism falls into two categories, legitimate and illegitimate criticism. A legitimate concern is the airplane not having wings. An illegitimate criticism is the airplane not having a cool looking tail stripe. Being able to pick out between the two is important and sometimes what is legitimate and what is not is not easy to define. One person’s racial concerns over the depiction of a character might not be a legitimate issue to everyone.

I’ve been downing comics at horrifyingly high rates thanks to Marvel Unlimited (which probably means I’ll never do part 2 of my Exiles “review”. During the experience I’ve been getting opinions and thoughts and wishing I had more money to support all of the good books that came out or that are still coming out. But one thing I’ve been coming up against while in my binges is when pages stop readers in a bad way. When the elements of the page don’t come together it is problematic so I am gonna talk Wolverine and the X-men and King City at you.

So yesterday I wrote a long long long post about my issues with Earth X because I spent a lot of time reading it and it was just really flawed. It was too long with too many tangents, too many ideas that went nowhere and too many stories given equal billing, I can appreciate that it tried to go big and use all of these ideas, but it didn’t work. They say that better stories are made by what you can take out and that is my idea for Earth X; edit, cut and reorganize.

I’m using someone else’s marvel account to read the unlimited comics and what they buy print. I also listen to them on what to read at least part of the time. So I’ve finally been reading Fraction’s Iron Man and I was shaky on it first. Larocca’s art took time to grow. Fraction took time to get in the grove but he knows how to play the long game, to make comics fun. And so I reached 500.1, right after that renumbering, right after the future skip issue.

500.1 came to me when I was working in the comic shop. I didn’t read Iron Man at the time. I heard 500 was good though and it was enjoyable though I missed out on stuff. Tony losing the memory of every Bendis event (insert joke about how if only we could all be so lucky, cheap punches).